Haunted Ladies Literary Club

Prologue

Great Brinsley Green was not famous for its ghosts. It surely had them, like any respectable English village with a six-hundred year history, but lately there had been a noticeable rise in spectral activity, as if a door had opened and the curious of the other side were peeking through, perhaps considering taking up a residence.

There was that time when the locals who had gathered at the popular Queen Ann’s Pub, across the central roundabout from the old churchyard of St Mary the Virgin at the centre of town, had encountered the second strangest apparition.

Mick McGuinty and his then current fluff, Denise Nedison, had escaped the eyes of Mick’s mates for a snog in the misty shadows among the ancient gravestones. Mick had whispered in her ear over the din of an Ed Sheeren song to suggest something much too dirty to say aloud and held out his hand. Denise was game and had gone with him.

Old moss covered gravestones mingled with the newer ones, as if ancient neighbors had to make room for the interloping newcomers, occupying a hilly slope of unkempt green in front of the town's old Norman era church. It had been visited once by King Edward II on his way to Coventry, but now the occupants of the graves lay in mostly unheralded peace.

Mick had tugged Denise by one hand, her other stifling a naughty giggle as they trotted across the narrow street and into the graveyard. They had stumbled through the strewn brambles to a corner of the green hidden by the low branches of an ancient elm. The voices of their mates could be heard echoing from the pub across the green and Mick had just begun to fiddle under Denise’s shirt and kiss her, when it appeared. She had frozen stiff as a stone, and Mick wondered if she was going to push him off of her.

“What? You turnin’ prude now?” he had said with the annoyance of callow youth, but then he noticed her eyes were as wide as a half-crown. He turned to look where her horrified gaze was fixed and saw it, too.

In the fog behind them, a form was shaping in the mist. It hadn’t seemed at first at all like a human shape, just an amorphous swirl of cloying moisture, but as they had watched, it gathered into what appeared like the outline of four separate figures, apparitions, in the shape of women in what might have seemed to be dresses, as if from some past forgotten age, like the 19th Century. Well, certainly before anyone was born.

Denise had shrieked in terror and run off through the grave stones, back toward the pub for the safety of numbers, but Mick had been braver, for at least an instant.

“Sod off, ya wanker!” he had bravely shouted at the apparition that had come the closest to him, but the moulding form only advanced on him, seeming to reach out with arms to enfold him and drag him to the darkest reaches of the seventh level of hell. So, he had run, his feinted bravery vanished as quickly as the mist was vanishing behind him, but left on the wind was what seemed like the soft laugh of a woman’s voice among the headstones, drifting on the breeze.

But that was some weeks ago now, and mostly forgotten, with anyone who had heard the story sure that Mick had just made it up to excuse his failure to get under Denise’s skirt that night. He had, however managed to dog her in the riverside green park the Sunday following, so the incident was complete in legend by the time I arrived.

My name is Teri Lynn Hope. Most people call me Teri, but I like the rhythm of it with the middle name. I’m an American. I was born in New York, Tarrytown, in Westchester, but in my teens grew up mostly in New Hampshire, where my father taught English Literature at Hartfield, a small New England College. While still in my formative grade school years I had heard many of the old Dutch legends of the early colonial days in Tarrytown, Rip Van Winkle and the echoes of ancient trolls of the enchanted netherworld bowling among the green hills of Westchester, when it was still New Holland. The headless horseman chasing Ichabod Crane with his flaming pumpkin was the stuff of my childhood, so perhaps ghosts were not in nature so alien to me, but to meet them as I soon would was still a shock.

I had arrived at Heathrow from JKF on a Virgin Atlantic Boeing Triple 7. The movie selection on the seat back which had been my companion for six hours was, at best, distracting. I had been distracting myself a lot in these past few months since my father’s death, so that distraction was now, it seemed, the principal motivating force in my life. I wanted to change that. I needed to, or else I might drown. That was why I had come to England, to escape. To distract me from my distraction.

I had graduated with a master’s degree in psychology from Boston College three years ago but spent most of the last two taking care of my father. It was an exercise in palliative care and pain medication, reading until he would sleep, until he would sleep no more. I had studied the mind and behavior, but it seemed now I knew more about nursing than anything else. When he was at last at rest, I had no desire to practice anything like medicine. I had spent sleepless nights calming his hallucinations of evil plots against him by phantom enemies, until I was the last enemy. A psychological practice held no interest. I had no desire to sit in an office and listen to others talk of their depression and petty angst. I had enough of those on my own, to take on anyone else’s. Nor, did I want to work in a laboratory. Human behavior in artificial intelligence held some fascination for me and I had thought about pursuing tech, but I didn’t.

What I really wanted to do was write. Not the feel-good self-help kind of pop psychology or annotated analytic examination of experimental studies sort of writing that my degree would condemn me to. I wanted to write novels, not important novels, but the beach reading kind. Romantic novels. I suppose I would have to admit my own life was bereft of romance, and maybe I was seeking it in staring at a page of computer text but maybe that was distraction, too. I had read and attended lectures, and searched through the endless sites of author self-publishing advice but stare at the page as much as I could, I could not advance a story that grasped my attention. And then, I saw it. I had come across the listing while Googling for Gutenberg free text of Byronic poetry. It seemed to me the perfect solution. Drastic enough, I suppose, but a drastic change was what I needed if I was to escape.

So, here I begin my story, as I experienced it, but please forgive me if I tell it, not as myself, but in what they call in English class, Third Person Past Tense, because I’m learning to write novels and that is how you’re supposed to do it. So, it’s almost like observing myself from another plain of existence, as I now know, others were as well.

Chapter 1

Nesting

Teri Lynn Hope arrived at Heathrow with a few items of luggage, just enough to cram in the overhead bins and a precious computer bag that would fit under the seat in front. It appeared hardly at all that she had come to live in England, but had left most of the junk of her past life in a storage locker after selling the house inherited from her father, and disembarked light and clean for a fresh start. She was committed to making it work, so the bus seemed to be the best choice to get to—she had to check her email again, just to get it right. It was such an odd sort of very English name for a town, Great Brinsley Green.

When she first read it online, she had to laugh. What was so great about it? Was it big? It didn’t sound like it, a small town, it almost could be called a village, somewhere between bigger towns along the Thames River, just far enough from London to escape the great urban sprawl. Was it important? It seemed to have little historic significance, except for that visit of the medieval king once to the town church. No, there was not a lot of note that had happened in Great Brinsley Green. Some stray bombs had fallen on it in the Second World War, German blitz bombers who had flown off course and missed their target. There had been a robbery from the military base not far away but that was not in the town itself. No, the only historical event that had happened in Great Brinsley in about 400 years, was the one notable incident that had grabbed Teri Lynn’s attention, and that was thinly mentioned in the “to let” notice she had found on the RoomsforU.com website and almost nowhere else. But it was just great enough for Teri Lynn to pack up, pick up, and get on a plane to a new life. So, just maybe she was hoping Brinsley Green might be great, at least for her.

She found the bus line to Maidenhead and Marlow to Oxford at the curb of the Central Terminal. The coach driver tucked her carry-on underneath among the other scattered bags. He offered to take her computer bag, but it was too precious. She wanted to keep it close. Not that it was that expensive, but somehow represented the essence of her journey. The coach was still nearly empty as it departed, swaying around the curving and merging lanes to escape the airport and roll out onto the motorway.

Her phone had found a network to connect to and she had several messages from Francis and Godiva back in Burlington. They were her two dearest friends and she had promised to give them a running account of the adventure in her new life. Francis had been completely against it, but Godiva encouraging. Godiva was the wildest of the three “mousketeerettes” as they had once called themselves. A girl whose mother had named her for a naked lady riding a horse through town, Godiva had for most of her twenty-six years been determined to live up to the name, even though her mother had long claimed she was thinking of the chocolate when they chose it.

Teri snapped a selfie, trying to catch the angle of the motorway out the window, wondering if you could tell in the picture the lanes were backward. She promised to send updates, but realized from the time they were probably both still asleep, five hours behind.

After twenty minutes on the motorway, the coach swung around a circle and rumbled over an old stone bridge across what must have been a canal connecting to the Thames River further on. The bridge was narrow and traffic had to squeeze almost one at time to cross it, before the road headed into the main part of the town. Teri could see the heavy square medieval steeple of the Norman church that marked the town centre. “Great Brinsley Green,” the coach driver announced in his microphone.

The coach door closed with a hiss of pneumatic air and the machine rumbled back into High Street and away, leaving Teri with her bags on the pavement walk in front of the village Postal Office. It was mid-day in Brinsley. Teri would soon learn that the locals usually left off the “great” and often the “green”. There was a Little Brinsley, but it had long been clawed into the suburban modern town that was Brinsley. High Street had once been a pilgrimage road from London to Oxford through the Thames Valley. It was now lined with the shops of modern life, taking up buildings that had accumulated over centuries. A few of them were listed historic structures, but much of the growth had come in the post-war decades. A Tesco market had taken up a lot which had once been a school for girls. Traffic moved in a stream through the middle of town down High Street during the business week. Passersby on the pavement sidewalk going about their routines looked at the blond young woman standing among travel bags at the coach stop, focused on her phone, looking lost, obviously a tourist.

“Can I help you, Miss?” asked a kindly woman of middle age, carrying a bag of groceries from the Tesco.

“Oh, thank you,” said Teri, looking up from the map she had been scrolling, but which kept directing her to some other Brinsley far to the north somewhere. “I’m looking for the Albemore House. It’s supposed to be on High Street, number 138. It shouldn’t be hard to find. This is High Street, isn’t it?”

The woman smiled at the American accent. She politely pointed to the west. “It’s doors down, love. The mobile shop. Can’t miss it.”

“Mobile shop?” Teri was confused, but the kindly local had moved on. At least the direction was clear. Teri pulled the handle from her rolling bag and started along the street to the west, past windows of businesses and shops. A few people turned to look at the stranger.

It wasn’t long before the woman’s direction made sense. There it was, on a corner where the main road intersected with a narrow lane, a large building which appeared to be a few hundred years old, but modernized and upgraded, sandwiched between more contemporary neighbors. It was white plaster with the half-wood timbers of ancient oaks still visible, even though painted over.

The Albemore House had survived the centuries to now provide spaces on the lower street level for commercial shops, with an upper floor and gabled, slightly over-hanging, sloped roof. A T-Mobile phone shop occupied the bottom floor on one side and a Schawarma take-away shop inhabited the other side, with windows covered with welcome and specials signs, as if needing to beg for business. The building next to it, sharing a common wall, was a motorcycle repair garage.

There was an entrance door in the middle of the building, between the two commercial shops obviously leading to the upper floors which were evidently residential. A To Let sign was attached above and to the right of the doorway.

Teri Lynn was disappointed at her first view of it. She, of course, had seen the photograph online in the rental listing, but in person it seemed to lack some of the musty ancient character she had hoped for. It was, after all, the atmosphere of history she had come four thousand miles to find. But here she was and perhaps, she thought, it might hold treasures of surprise and delight inside.

She dialed the number she had programmed into her phone from the listing, and hoped he wouldn’t be too surprised.

“Yes,” was the simple answer of the slightly thick male voice on the phone, after the blipping rattle of the dialing code.

“Hello, I’m here,” said Teri.

“Here? Where? Who is this, please?” came the confused answer.

“I’m out in front, now. On High Street, in Great Brinsley Green. It’s Teri Lynn, we spoke about your rental?”

There was a long pause, then a surprised hike in the voice, “From the States?! Yes, of course. You’ve caught me. I wasn’t expecting— Wait, then, I’ll be right along. Ten minutes.”

“Okay. I’ll wait. I don’t have anywhere else to be.” Teri tried to make a joke as she hung up. It was probably lucky someone answered. What if she had come all this way and the place had been taken, or just got voice mail? Ten minutes was hardly any time at all.

Several cars had come along the road as Teri waited. They seemed to speed up just as they passed where she stood as they headed out of town or slowed as they came from the other direction for the inner zone speed limit. She was expecting one of the cars to slow and stop with the building’s owner, but she soon noticed a rather fleshy fellow in a corduroy jacket over his rumpled neck tie hurrying up the pavement from the centre of town.

He appeared to be approaching forty or just past and arrived a bit out of breath, his heavy frame making use of the exercise, of which he clearly could use some more.

“You caught me by surprise. I wasn’t expecting— From where did you come?”

“Burlington—Vermont,” she answered, wondering if she should explain where it was. “Didn't you think I was serious?”

“Well, one receives a ring from America about a flat—”

The narrow stair opened to a larger hall with the slightly undulating walls of a building so old, with lath walls behind the new plaster of recent restorations. The half-timber support beams of hand-hewn oak were exposed, covered with black paint and lacquer. The hall separated two doors. Chadwick pulled keys from his pocket. They rattled on a small ring. He found the right key and turned it in the latch of a door marked with a large brass cursive number one.

The door opened into a flat. The upper floors of the house had clearly been divided into two apartments. The room had a certain charm of classic cottage style, large, with exposed wood beams and brick fireplace, with Queen Ann wooden captain chairs arranged in front of it. A vented safety burner had been placed on the hearth so no burning embers of an untended log fire would set the ancient house ablaze. A hall beyond the main sitting room divided two bedrooms and a small kitchenette with modern updated appliances. Teri took a glance around, surprised that it was more current than she expected, while still retaining some of its old world atmosphere.

“To tell you the truth,” she continued with explanation. “I'm a little surprised myself. But I decided to just go for it.”

He looked at her, oddly, not quite sure what she meant. “Go for it?”

“I need the inspiration.”